4 Ways to Increase Your Mind-Body Connection
Mind-Body connection has been a constant struggle for me as someone who grew up in a high-control Evangelical environment with an eating disorder. My faith practice told me that I could not trust my body. My body wanted “evil” things like sex, and I must resist my body’s natural urges in order to practice my faith and devotion to God and my religion. Also, my constant focus on losing weight and starving myself to be thin caused me to ignore my body’s hunger cues. I felt so hungry all the time, but told myself that I was not hungry. I had already eaten enough for the day, and I could not accomplish my weight-loss goals by giving in to this hunger.
1. Body Positive Meditation: Some forms of meditation can help with mind-body connection. I like repeating these phrases while meditating to connect with my body: I feel my body; I am my body; I am in my body; I am connected to my body; I heal my body; I trust myself to feed myself. I also like to do a body-scan meditation. This is where you place your thoughts at the top of your head and focus on each individual part of your body and how they connect, for example: take a minute to think of relaxing the top of your head, then relax your neck, then relax your eyebrows and jawline…keep going until you get to your toes. Very soothing.
2. Yoga can be a safe form of exercise to help you honor your body. Yoga teaches that you should not force your body into a pose but follow your body’s direction on how far and how much to stretch or strengthen. During yoga, you move through poses with your breath, in and out, to maintain connection.
3. Assign a number to how you feel - My therapist gave me a helpful assignment that really helped me tune into my body’s feelings. She had me set an alarm for every hour and write down how my body felt in the form of a number. Zero was neutral; positive one through ten was feeling good; and negative one through negative ten was feeling bad. This was so enlightening! I was surprised to find that I was mostly feeling negative one almost all day everyday. First this exercise taught me to pay attention to how I’m feeling. Next, it taught me to think about what caused the feeling. On days when I was a positive 4 or 5, I had exercised in the morning. Talking to one friend was causing a decrease in good feelings and talking to another friend was causing a sharp positive increase in good feelings.
4. Answer prompts - In the evening, when there is stillness and I am not distracted by work, I find my mind is wild with thoughts. My brain loves to relive all the negative experiences I have had in my life when it has down time. This is when I binge eat. I am trying in the evening to sit with my feelings for a minute and ask myself: how do I actually feel? Am I hungry and what level of hunger (1-10)? Am I upset? What would soothe me in this moment? How can I relax right now?
Mind-body connection is a constant practice and journey. I hope these strategies that helped me will also help you.
End of a great yoga session. I did a 40 minute video provided by @leannahenning at @yellowbrickyoga. Highly recommend!